The Movie the Faithful Want You to See

Jesus is the star of the latest faith-based blockbuster movie, Son of God, but a new conservative hero may well break out of a smaller, independent film. Persecuted, which opens in theaters May 9, is a political thriller about an evangelist facing down a government threat to destroy religious freedom in America. In Son of God, the main character is divine; the Persecuted protagonist, the film’s producers suggest, could be you.

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Persecuted screened this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside of Washington, D.C., and it couldn’t have found a more sympathetic audience. The tribulations of the evangelist, not so subtly named John Luther, seem calculated to capitalize on conservative claims that a tyrannical government is infringing on their religious freedom. The spreading legalization of same-sex marriage, the contraception coverage requirement under the Affordable Care Act and other laws have convinced many religious conservatives that, as political strategist Ralph Reed told the CPAC crowd at another event, “Our freedom as Americans to practice our religious liberties and to express our faith in God is under assault as never before.”

If so, it’s under assault from within the right itself, as the film comes at a time when libertarian-leaning and younger conservatives are starting to make their peace with same-sex marriage. At one CPAC panel, Alexander McCobin, president of the libertarian group Students for Liberty, argued, “gay marriage is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.” A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fully half of Republicans between the ages of 18 and 33 favor same-sex marriage, compared with just 18 percent of Republicans over 68.

But religious liberty is one issue both social conservatives and libertarians can coalesce around. It lets each camp play into the other’s concerns by invoking a fear of government strong-arming its citizens, in this case by violating their religious conscience in making them comply with secular laws. In that sense, Persecuted is perfectly pitched to bring CPAC’s dominant wings together.

About 150 people attended the Friday-night screening, and responded eagerly to the producers’ plea to help them promote the film. Unlike Son of God, which debuted last weekend in 3,260 theaters across the country, grossing $26.5 million, Persecuted is very much a do-it-yourself affair. Without studio backing, the producers said, they need supporters to pre-purchase at least 500 tickets per city just to be able to fund a weeklong screening.

Daniel Lusko, the movie’s writer and director, told me he was an admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, and aimed to emulate his work. But Persecuted is more like a made-for-TV melodrama than The Man Who Knew Too Much. It is rife with ham-fisted symbolism—Luther’s name is just one example—and plot twists that range from inexplicable to implausible. Imagine House of Cards for the religious set: that’s Persecuted.

The film opens with Luther (James Remar, who played the father of a serial killer on the Showtime drama Dexter) refusing a last-ditch effort of Senate Majority Leader Donald Harrison (Bruce Davison, best known for his role as Sen. Robert Kelly in the X-Men movies) to convince him to endorse the Faith and Fairness Act, a bill that would give “equal time” to all religions. “I cannot water down the gospel to advance anyone’s political agenda,” Luther tells Harrison in one of many robotic pronouncements.

Furious, the senator dispatches what later is revealed to be a Secret Service agent to drug Luther and frame him for the rape and murder of a 16 year-old girl. Emerging from his stupor the next morning on a rural roadside, Luther discovers a massive manhunt for him is underway. He spends the remainder of the film attempting to prove his innocence and evading the government’s efforts to assassinate him.

One of the film’s many duff notes involves Fred Thompson, the former senator and presidential candidate, who plays Dr. Charles Luther, John Luther’s father, a Catholic priest. Thompson’s grimly earnest Luther advises his son that he’s “just a pawn in a bigger game” and that he must “stand up against a cabal of phony politicians” who “can’t silence the truth.” How the protagonist, named for the founder of the Protestant Reformation, is the son of a Catholic priest, is never explained in the film. After Father Luther is executed by government agents, his evangelical son goes to his church, takes communion, enlists the help of one of the younger priests in his father’s parish and begins carrying a rosary.

Lusko explained the backstory in an interview: Father Luther had a family before becoming a priest, and father and son had been estranged until the younger Luther’s crisis. (In very rare instances, the Catholic Church has permitted ordination of priests who are married, but only when they were clergy in another denomination and chose to convert to Catholicism.) The father-son relationship, Lusko told me, “represented the schism between the Catholic and the evangelical church.” Lusko added that “under persecution,” these denominational differences disappear, as with the evangelical son and his Catholic father.

But it’s precisely the erasure of religious differences that lies at the heart of the diabolical government plot at the center of the story. Luther, the evangelist, runs a ministry called Truth. The government seeks, through the Faith and Fairness Act, to impose “equality for all faiths,” a concept presented darkly as the mysterious acronym SUMAC, with symbols nearly identical to a Unitarian Universalist “co-exist” bumper sticker.

After Luther’s disappearance, Truth’s rapacious board of directors, led by Luther’s double-crossing right-hand man, Ryan Morris (comedian Brad Stine) meets to decide whether to support the bill. After Morris tells them they will get tax breaks and earmarks (eliciting a knowing groan from the audience), they decide to support it. Gone are the Truth logos; they are replaced with SUMAC’s irreligious leaf motif.

In front of the SUMAC logo, Senator Harrison is shown telling an audience: “This is no longer a Christian nation! It never has been!”

After Luther returns from hiding to confront Harrison, the senator defends the bill as “the most crucial piece of legislation since the Bill of Rights.” He won’t have time for remedial civics class, though, as moments later he is gunned down by the same agent he ordered to frame Luther. But before he meets his end, he abruptly reveals the bill isn’t about religion at all, but about national security. If someone has a bomb hidden in a mosque or a temple, Harrison tells Luther, “I don’t have oversight!”

“Given our current administration,” said Avi Davis, president of the American Freedom Alliance, a Los Angeles think tank that “promotes, defends and upholds Western values and ideals,” the film could depict realistic events, a sentiment echoed by others in the crowd.

“Government has already overtaken freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the Second Amendment,” said Teresa Frerking, a CPAC attendee from Kentucky. “I have lost total faith in the government.”

“It was very credible in this day and age,” Marlene Curry, a CPAC attendee from Virginia, said. “I grew up in a country where government was restrained and represented the people. And of course that’s no longer the case.”

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Persecuted is very much the personal project of Daniel Lusko, the movie’s 30-year-old writer and director. Lusko grew up Christian, the son of a pastor, Chip Lusko, in Albuquerque, N.M. Interested in filmmaking as a teenager, Lusko attended the New York Film Academy at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, and then worked with his father’s production company.

Lusko told me he wrote the script five years ago, before many of the recent political battles with the Obama administration, but said the film’s themes of religious persecution were “timeless.” On his blog, Lusko’s father has praised his son’s perseverance in pursuing funding for the film. The elder Lusko also described the film’s prescience, as his son wrote it “before it was obvious the IRS, DOJ and other organized government arms were targeting people of faith.”

Sarah Posner is an investigative journalist and author of God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters. She blogs at Religion Dispatches.